Cullingworth nestles in Yorkshire's wonderful South Pennines and I have the pleasure and delight to be the village's Conservative Councillor. But these are my views - on politics, food, beer and the stupidity of those who want to tell me what to think or do. And a little on mushrooms.

Tuesday, 14 March 2017

Fake news tells us why scholarly publishing profits matter

It has been a bugbear of the increasingly left-wing word of academia that their work is published in paid-for scholarly journals resulting is successful businesses making significant profits (and employing thousands of clever products of those universities into the bargain). They say stuff like this:

It is easy at a high level to think about how knowledge could be unbundled, but once a framework is developed, then graduate students who were learning and reading past knowledge would be encouraged to translate their own information into the new framework. The knowledge could be freed from the bounds of journals without undermining all the curation and attribution work that goes with them. And at the same time, a searchable database that is open by design would exist not for articles, pages, or PDFs, but for the knowledge itself.

And my response is: yeah, and which bit of the fake news story sloshing around after Trump's election did you not understand? You need publishers and their journals because they provide assurance, a guarantee that the stuff therein isn't simply rubbish. And because this matters - indeed is absolutely central to the idea of academia - you want to make sure those publishers aren't tempted by fakery. So you let them earn their profits.